Incest, genius, death-wish, sublimity, funk, chromaticism: Metaphysical Licks has the cascading Germanic fever of Friederike Mayröcker or Ingeborg Bachmann's wildest flights, spliced with the equally hot boy-vibes of those ghosts (Kafka, Wittgenstein, et al.) whose lives and words Gregoire Pam Dick employs as divining rods for brilliantly autoerotic, recombinatory investigation. Pure sound-play motivates the atonal yet romantic inebriation of this book's mad enactment of molten Becoming indiscreetly remixed as comp-lit-porn. Language has never been so smartly flayed. —Wayne Koestenbaum

Reading Metaphysical Licks is like seeing Kafka's ghostwriter whump Beckett under a streetlight, dodge Punch-n-Judy at a pop machine, and beat Walty Benjamin at solitaire. Gregoire Pam Dick's ghosts are philosophy and abstract expressionism, a rattle of voice and dust in the East Village of NYC, and the lives of poet Georg and his sis Grete Trakl, sibling liebling rivalries up late and touching each other, soothed by panic, waking with ADD ritalin crack poppers and abscessed eyes. —Erín Moure

I read Metaphysical Licks as a deep biography situated equally in a contemporary androgynous sensibility and in a marvelously incestuous and poetic vision of the German philosophical tradition. Its wildly diverse language games are (laudably) as circumspect as they are rebellious. Licks is equally noteworthy for its genre play, its devotion to Greta in herhis many valences, and for its sustained consideration of suicidality, divided consciousness, and the primary potencies of sibling intimacy. —Carla Harryman